January 28, 2018

Editor's note: Walter Carey writes: "David Huntley, my source for this story, is the pseudonym of an executive at CBS who asked that he or she not be named. -- WC." See our earlier dispatch of October 13, 2017.

It has now been nearly half a year since Linda Reagan''s demise, and the question that has haunted fans of "Blue Bloods" refuses to die, let alone get answered. Did she jump or was she pushed?

"The contracts of contract players are up for review each season, and that's the simple fact," Max Shumacher said. When asked point-blank if the decision to eliminate Linda Reagan from the plot was the consequence of a salary dispute with Amy Carlson, the actress who portrayed Danny Reagan's wife in the hit TV series, he would neither deny nor confirm the allegation. In October, Carlson broke her public silence to say that she didn't think her departure from the show was handled well but that it had been "an honor to be part of a superb ensemble cast" and that Danny has been very sweet about it. "He really has a gentle side, which he tries to keep under wraps," she said.

What most concerns Linda and her fans is the way the plot accommodated her sudden elimination from it and the Sunday night family dinners for which the show is famous. "It was like an execution," Felicity Unger said. Ms. Unger, vice president of the Television Psychology Association, said she spoke for other psychologists who felt that fans of the Friday night procedural need "a way to grieve, to move through it."

Linda Reagan's demise occurs off-screen, between seasons of the long-running program. It is a particularly brutal death -- she dies in a helicopter crash. "She was doing her job," the police psychologist counsels Danny, who refuses to be consoled. "She died the way she would have wanted to die -- in the line of duty, same as you." But the unsettling feeling persists that a helicopter crash represented a certain producer's hostility to Linda and the long-repressed wish to "off the bitch." -- W. C.

January 27, 2018

I became a fan of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's poetry when I saw the title of his 1967 New Directions book: POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS. The idea of antipoems fit with my own approach to poems, which at the time I was having a lot of published in what we called then "little magazines" and "underground newspapers."

I couldn't read much Spanish, so I depended on the translators of the poems in the book, which ranged from Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov to W. S. Merwin and Miller Williams, all of whom I knew then, a time when it was possible to know most of the poets on your side of the poetry fence.

Miller Williams was the main translator and wrote the introduction, in which he stated something that I thought expressed my approach, or my desire, at the time: "antipoetry is unadorned, is unlyrical, is nonsymbolist; in antipoetry what you see is what you see; antipoetry is chiseled, solid."

I met Parra a few times, but it was in 1970 at a reading in DC where he signed my copy of POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS, with just a big cursive version of my name followed by an explanation point: "Michael!" then "Nicanor" and under that "70" and under that "Washington." A chiseled, solid inscription.

He was a scientist as well as a poet, and he was 103 when he passed. I am grateful that he led such a rich, full, long life and was recognized as an important and influential poet. He was to me.

Here's Miller Williams' translation of a short poem from that book:

ROLLER COASTER

For half a centuryPoetry was the paradiseOf the solemn fool.Until I cameAnd built my roller coaster.

Go up, if you feel like it.I'm not responsible if you come downWith your mouth and nose bleeding.

January 26, 2018

Balanchine is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here is a handful of Mr. B’s observations.

"God made men to sing the praises of women."

"When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean? What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing."

"The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener. "

"Dance is music made visible." (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)

“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).

“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”

"Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time."

"In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it."

And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, "I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it."

See Arlene Croce's "Balanchine Said" in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”

David Lehman’s new book, Poems in the Manner Of … is a waltz through the history of poetry and a self-portrait in the fun house mirrors of style. “In the manner of” here means sound-alikes, inspired-bys, collages, fresh translations, and other deep visits with a poet, or a poetic age. Because of the way time whittles, if you are a reader of poetry throughout history, mostly in English, you likely have a similar inner literature. Today we are living in a dazzling era of new poetry, a sky full of fireworks from many directions. Stepping into this book the night sky goes dark and quiet and we recognize the constellations. It’s a compelling and thought-provoking encounter with poetry I already love, plus tantalizing additions. Headnotes for each poem give a hint of background, share confidences, crack wise. The book’s introduction explains that there is a didactic aim in this, “If I have done my job, aspiring poets will look at this book and attempt their own poems ‘in the manner of…’ the poets they most admire.”

January 24, 2018

I received a gratifying email from a former Columbia MFA student—now a creative writing teacher—about a chapter in my book The Writing Workshop Note Book (Soft Skull / Counterpoint). I am reprinting the note, followed by an adapted excerpt from the chapter. At my former student’s request, I have removed details that might identify the school and am withholding her name.

Hello Professor Ziegler, Our seminar-style classes have students of mixed grade levels—freshmen through senior. Recently, the returning students staged a bit of a mutiny. Three pulled me aside and complained about a lack of “professionalism” in the workshopping abilities of the several new students. Apparently, they felt that their own writing, comments, and insights were much more sophisticated than those of the younger students, and that they, the “experienced” workshoppers, took the process much more seriously, which had led to a desperate crisis. I heard them out and asked them what they thought we could do. They wanted to have an in-class discussion in which they could air their concerns (and, of course, also assert their perceived superiority, I knew). So, for our next class I handed out your first chapter in “Part Two: Notes on Workshopping.” We went around the room, each student taking a turn reading a paragraph or two aloud. Beforehand, I asked them while reading to make note of those sections that rang true to them or felt most meaningful or helped them discover something they didn’t know or felt they could use. (Worth noting: as soon as we finished reading, one of the discontented three closed her packet dramatically and exclaimed, “That was great!”) Afterward I asked each student to share what they learned they might be able to think about or do differently to get the most out of the workshop. We spent 1 1/2 hours of our 3-hour class reading and discussing your chapter, and each student (even those poor terrified freshmen) shared their feelings about their work and experience, ranging from fear of speaking because of feelings of intimidation (without mentioning any names or making eye content) and fear of “not being right” to acknowledgment of tendencies to dominate the conversation (one of those three upperclassman, remarkably). The effects were quite wonderful, and the group left class in bright spirits. So, thank you. I wanted to let you know what had happened so you could add this small moment to what I am sure is a long and continually growing list of success stories directly linked to your approach to teaching writing and to your invaluable notebook, which you so generously shared with all of us. Little did I know at the time how helpful both would be. With my thanks and best regards,

DObe there. If you are absent you cannot “make up” the work any more than athletes in team sports can make up games they miss. Even if the teacher allows one or two absences, don’t take them as a matter of entitlement; classes should not be cut like excess verbiage. If you are in an academic program, don’t tell the instructor that you had to miss class because a history paper was due (unless you would tell your history professor that you missed class because you were writing a poem).

DON’T try to establish yourself as the alpha writer. It is not good for you, and it is not good for the workshop. A friend told me that in her first term in a graduate writing program, several students submitted their “greatest hits” for critique, more concerned with establishing themselves as workshop stars than with transforming their writing. They left the workshop with pretty much what they had brought to it. My friend, on the other hand, brought in raw material and left with a chunk of her first novel.

DO be on time. Being late for a literature class is disruptive, but Balzac or any Bronte will not suffer. If you are late for a writing workshop, a very alive writer could be hurt if a critique is in progress. Chronic lateness can be infectious, causing critique time to be truncated.

DON’T try to establish yourself as the alpha critic. Witty, scathing critiques should be saved for reviews of books by authors making tons of undeserved money. One student was told in class that his writing was “an affront to literature.” The workshop is not the guardian of literature; we are door-openers, not gatekeepers.

DO be helpful to the teacher in giving everyone an opportunity to speak. In some workshops, a few students tend to dominate the discussions. If you are one of the talkers, you can help by hanging back occasionally. Think of it as being selfish—receiving rather than dispensing wisdom.

DON’T think: What kind of person would write such a thing? The only transgressions you should hold authors responsible for are their characters’ unmotivated words and deeds.

DO be a nurturer.

DON’T bea coddler.

DO be patient and don’t make snap judgments about the effectiveness of a teacher or workshop. If you feel frustrated, don’t let it hamper your full and open participation; it is hard to learn from inside a shell. The wisdom derived from a class may not take full effect immediately. You may find yourself internalizing a teacher’s voice years down the road. This is not to say that the workshop should create a posthypnotic state, where you blindly repeat what you were told, but if you ingest as much as possible during the term, you have a good shot at reaping benefits long after the workshop is over. And even what appear to be irreconcilable differences can have a felicitous effect on your work, just as irritants induce oysters to make pearls.

DON’T be too jealous of any successes by others in the workshop; success can be contagious. You never know where your classmates will wind up, and what they might be able to do for you. This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever experience an inkling of what Gore Vidal was referring to when he revealed, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” If this schadenfreude-in-reverse happens, just shrug and think, Oh, you again, and offer congratulations. Think: "I am literally in the same class as this genius!"

DO be attentive to your classmates’ work. Read with care and concern.

DON’T belabor a point once it’s been made and remade. I was on a jury when an attorney kept hammering home the same nail, until the judge said, “Noted, now move on.”

DO be communicative with your teacher if you have any significant problems with your writing or with the class.

DON’T be intimidated by what your classmates write. There’s a chance you may be doing something they can’t do. The story goes that a marathon champion met someone at a party who had just run a marathon. The champion asked what the fellow’s time was, and the guy sheepishly confessed that he hadn’t even broken five hours. The champion replied with admiration, “I can’t imagine running for five hours straight.”

DO be generous to your classmates by giving thoughtful comments. A workshop’s success is dependent not only on the openness of students to take criticism, but also on their willingness to give it. Some students don’t want to say anything they are not absolutely sure of, so they don’t say anything. Keep in mind that responses are as much works-in-progress as the pieces under consideration, and our ideas can crystallize through talking. As Gracie Allen said to George Burns, “Do you know that almost everything I know today I learned by listening to myself talk about something I didn’t understand.”

DON’T try to get even. The following comment by a student evinced an audible reaction from several others when I read it to the class: “I often feel guarded with my criticism of others’ work, for fear that anything too harsh (honest?) might result in a reciprocal attack on my work.” Such retaliation is rare, but it can be like a chloroform-dipped rag on the life-breath of the class. Fortunately, the workshop process has a self-regulating feature: other voices are there to dilute the poison. If you do feel attacked, don’t react hostilely. Break a pencil point if you want to channel your anger (don’t do it with a fountain pen), and try to recast the comment into something useful. If the irritation persists, talk to your classmate or the teacher (but do it outside of class)—or make a pearl out of it.

DO be a good sport. If a classmate gets knocked down with criticism, extend a hand rather than pile on. (Perhaps the teacher should carry a penalty flag; anyone piling on has to move five yards away from the table for the next comment.)

DON’T keep score. A student came to my office, concerned that I often praised others whose work she considered to be weaker than hers; she feared that it devalued the praise I gave her. I asked her if my being harsher on the work of others would make her feel better. She replied, somewhat embarrassed, that her real concern was whether my praise for her work was sincere. I suggested that if she listened carefully to my comments, she could detect different levels of praise. But, more important, my comments are not only pitched to the general level of the class, but also to the level of each individual, so I might be singing praise in different keys.

DO be attentive when your work is being critiqued, and make note of everything said. Follow up on any points that might need clarification or elaboration. The more you sow during the critique, the more you reap when you rewrite.

DON’T repeat to outsiders what you hear and read in the workshop; assume that all information is confidential and all pieces are restricted to workshop members unless otherwise stated. This is especially important with material that may refer to the authors’ friends and families. (Don’t go to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a classmate and say, “Oh, Aunt Bess, I’m so sorry about the typo on your Elvis tattoo, and does it still hurt to sit down?”) I once received a phone call from the father of an upset student. His daughter had never taken a writing class, but her former boyfriend had workshopped a story about their breakup, which was being passed around the dorm.

DO be courteous with how you dress your manuscript for school. Unless instructed otherwise: Double-space (except for poetry); leave wide margins (top, bottom, right, left) for notes; run spell-checker, then proofread the old-fashioned way; place commas and periods inside the closing quotation mark; semicolons and colons, outside; indent new paragraphs (if you do not indent, insert a blank line between paragraphs); number pages (the computer will do this for you, but you must issue the order); don’t play with typography—just use a basic font (this is a draft, not a brochure); put your name, the title, and the date on the front page, along with an indication if the piece is in response to an assignment or is a revision of something previously turned in; fasten with a staple or clip.

DON’T let outside relationships enter the workshop. If you know any of your classmates in other contexts, try to neutralize whatever affection or animosity you may have for them.

DO be open. Not everything presented by your classmates will be your cup of tea, but your job is to sip from whatever is served. It is often a good thing for a writer to go through a literary-ideological phase, such as eschewing all first-person or present-tense narratives, or declaring “realism rules” or “surrealism is the only response to the wacky world.” When the writer’s and the respondent’s ideologies clash, the critiquer should be receptive. If you do make a comment colored by, say, an aversion to minimalist fiction or anything resembling science fiction, make your comment in the spirit of “This is what I would do if I were you,” rather than “This is what you would do if you were me.” The workshop puts a solitary act into public scrutiny, turning a solo effort into a group cause. We must not homogenize the individual voices in the room by maneuvering critiques toward a common vision. Rome may have been designed with all roads leading to it, but the workshop is more like an expanded version of Frost’s yellow wood, with roads diverging in many directions. Follow your classmates down the roads they choose; you may discover places to explore on your own.

It was your idea to speed-stack hayon this blistering July Sabbath, high-noon sunalready dripping off corrugated roofs and bodies,to hose down behind the barn, wash awayevidence of sinful industry. But I could be wrong.

It was your idea to pile our clothesfar away on the last wagon, so whenAunt Clara came by to bring pastor’s condolenceswe were as God created us, red-facedand headed for hell. But I could be wrong.

And it appears that next week's prompt was inspired by one of this week's winning poems, Millicent Caliban’s “Relative Certainty” which cleverly applies the phrase to teenage girls, Hamlet, Adam and Eve, the Trojans, and Columbus:

She’s only 14; this infatuation won’t last.Don’t worry, Claudius, he’ll soon snap out of it.My faith in her is absolute. Nothing could shake it.Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing as witches.Of course, I could be wrong.

He surely won’t mind if we take just one bite.They’re obviously seeking reconciliation by sending us a gift.No doubt we’ve reached an island off the coast of India.The sea is calm, the sky cloudless. No reason to be anxious.Although I could be wrong.

Hint hint: the ghost of Hamlet exists in your future, if you so choose to face next week's prompt, which can be found on the American Scholar's page along with the full post!

January 22, 2018

George Balanchine's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" is permanently imprinted on my brain, perhaps because I saw it during the year of its debut as a stand-alone ballet and with the original cast but also because the choreography perfectly matches the music, which is gorgeous, sexy, and haunting (listen to the theme that begins at around 1:30). I've seen it many times, most recently with David, during a NYCB collaboration with The Dance Theater of Harlem, the acclaimed company started by Arthur Mitchell.

Suzanne Farrell has written that she was unaccustomed to dancing a part that required her to be overtly sexual - she plays a stripper. Early on in rehearsal, her partner Arthur Mitchell said, "Come on, Suzanne, sex it up!" When Farrell stepped onto the stage, she really let loose. The heat these two premier dancers generated when they performed together was palpable, even in the fourth ring, where we were always seated.

It's hard to pick a favorite from among so many brilliant dances but if I had to, I might settle on Balanchine's Serenade with music by Tchaikovsky (Serenade in Strings in C, Op. 48). First conceived as a lesson in stage technique, Balanchine worked unexpected rehearsal events into the choreography. When one student fell, he incorporated it into the dance; another day, a student arrived late, and this too became part of the ballet.

On the other hand, I love Symphony in C Major, music by Georges Bizet. The former NYCB member Toni Bentley writes that dancing in the third movement is like being shot out of a canon at full force and maintaining that speed for the remaining six minutes of the ballet. And the fact that Bizet wrote the score when he was only 17 makes it even more remarkable. No matter that I've seen this ballet countless times, it still gets my heart racing.

Balanchine is famous also for his table talk and witty aphorisms: "God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it - from what I see, from what the dancers can do, from what others do" and "I disagree with everybody but I don't even want to argue” and “Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.” When a young choreographer sought his advice, he said, "Just keep making dances. Every now and then you'll make a good one." Good advice for poets, too.

January 19, 2018

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” Philip Larkin

1.

This quote from Larkin made me ask myself, _______ are for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. I started to wonder how other poets might answer this. What are your daffodils? How would my favorite poets answer this?

I thought that maybe New York City or painters would be for Frank O’Hara what daffodils were for Wordsworth, though it’s funnier to say that lunch is for O'Hara what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Barbies are for Denise Duhamel what daffodils were for Wordsworth, and angels could be for Rilke what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Orgasms might be my own personal daffodils, as well as Elvis and Jim and James Dean. I do love all three. Last night I dreamt of Elvis singing, Are you lonesome tonight . . . Are you worried we drifted apart, and I was, even in my sleep. I woke up thinking of the subconscious or unconscious . . .

Of how the unconscious might be for Jung what lonely clouds were for Wordsworth.

The penis might be for Freud what Tintern Abbey was for Wordsworth.

The ground of being was for Tillich what the leap of faith was for Kierkegaard. The overman was for Neitzche what the stranger was for Camus. Or would it be Sisyphus?

Today is Camus’ birthday. The New Yorker once called Camus the Don Draper of existentialism.

Maybe meaninglessness was for Camus what deprivation was for Larkin . . .

I read in The Paris Review that Larkin tried to make every day and every year exactly the same.

2.

My mind was spinning with all of this when I talked to Nicole Santalucia who joined in to say:

A ferry ride is for Whitman what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A beard is for Whitman what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Deep breathing is for Whitman what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A bulge in tight jeans is for Whitman what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A secret is for Dickinson what a pants suit is for Hillary Clinton

An attic is for Dickinson what a broach is for Gertrude Stein

A fly is for Dickinson what a nipple is for Gertrude Stein

Stillness is for Dickinson what Picasso is for Gertrude Stein

A nobody is for Dickinson what an everybody is for Gertrude Stein

An apple tree is for Dickinson what a poodle is for Gertrude Stein

A raindrop is for Williams what salvation is for Bradstreet

A chicken is for Williams what a husband is for Bradstreet

A black dress is for Maria Gillan what a paintbrush is for Frank O'Hara

3.

Then David Lehman added his commentary::

The irony is that Larkin's statement (which I quote in my poem "Desolation Row") is applicable not only to Larkin but to Wordsworth as well. In other words, for Wordsworth, too, deprivation was what daffodils were to the character who sees them in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

These are the crucial lines: "For oft when on my couch I lie, / In vacant or in pensive mood / They [the daffodils] flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude." The condition that triggers off the memory is solitude and vacancy - deprivation, in other words.

As for me, well, daffodils are for me what deprivation was for Larkin.

Champagne, no pain, and Mary Jane are for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A phone conversation with John Ashbery or an email from Nin Andrews is for me what daffodils.

Chocolates, snow, and myself are for David Shapiro what daffodils are for Wordsworth.

Or music stands, philodendrons, and philosophy are for David Shapiro what daffodils are for Wordsworth.

Shapiro is on the phone right now and I can hear him typing in the background. I recommend "champagne at night" to lift his spirits.

David (Shapiro) says: "'Champagne at Night' is a good title for you. Lindsay thinks so, too."

I am writing a novel while we talk.

O Natalie Wood!

You are to me what Natalie Wood was for me in 1964.

Kim Novak is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Kim Novak does not stand for anything other than Kim Novak.

Ava Gardner said, "Elizabeth Taylor is pretty. I was beautiful."

Marilyn Monroe singing "Heat Wave" is for me what fishing and hunting were for Ernest Hemingway.

Stacey is for me what roses were for Robert Burns.

Stacey is for me what silence was for John Cage.

Stacey is for me what Paris would be for me if this were 1973.

Stacey is for me what a psalm was for David.

Stacey is for David what David is for David.

A two-thousand dollar violin is for David Shapiro what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Alban Berg is for David Shapiro what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A James Tate poem is for John Ashbery what daffodils were for Wordsworth

A painting by Matisse is for Mrs. Matisse what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A flood is for Noah what the Tower of Babel was for modern linguistics.

Aer Lingus is for Charles Mingus what the Maltese Falcon is for Same Spade.

Dance is ephemeral while poetry has a chance to live on the page. But there are aspects of dance that I’d like to see happen in poetry––like gliding in and out of the wings of the stage, changing levels, and partnering. (My partner here is Edward Franklin, from a Michelle Ava AVAdance production, photo by Beatriz Paez.)

Collaborative poetry, such as some of the prompts of “Next Line, Please”, lends itself to a written type of partnering. Someone may be able to point out poetry that exits the page and returns with a different dynamic shape, or, at least, has that effect. Currently I’m experimenting with the idea of creating “moving poems”, where I am my poem moving.

It all started with a sixteen-count phrase improvised during practice for a collaborative choreography project. The prompt for movement had to do with an inner darkness coming to light. There was little time to think about my response, but in hindsight, that sixteen-count phrase correlated to a four line poem I’d already written. The two coalesced in an understanding of a parallel expression––and, in fact, both the poem and the performance debuted in July 2017, via publication and show, respectively.

Why not combine these modes of expression simultaneously? Let the dancer dancing be the poet speaking her poem. Or rather, let the dancer speaking her poem be the poet dancing. There’s that lovely blur again, how we began this conversation about dance and poetry on Monday, January 15.

There’s no end to that conversation, but to bring it to a close for now, here are three requests:

1. Can we bask in a blurring of lines to refine our sharp divisions and definitions? This is the edge that creativity brings us to.

2. There are many voices both in dance and poetry that deserve attention. My top five favorite companies in contemporary dance are: Ohad Naharin, Inbal Pinto, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, and Alvin Ailey. This is a must-see list. But there are lesser known companies and choreographers to discover––just like the writing scene. You can't find all you may want to read from a bookstore or library. There's so much more that hasn't made it there. Go to other venues, poetry readings, online forums. Likewise, see what is going on in your local dance community and the performing arts.

January 18, 2018

"Coffee makes a sad man, cheerful; a languorous man, active; a cold man, warm; a warm man, glowing; a debilitated man, strong. It intoxicates, without inviting the police; it excites a flow of spirits, and awakens mental powers thought to be dead . . . Coffee clears the mind of vapors; the brain of cobwebs; the heart of pain; the soul of care. It invigorates the faculties, and makes an old man young. It is the terror of advancing age. Creditors fly from it; debtors cry for it. When coffee is bad, it is the wickedest thing in town; when good, the most glorious. When it has lost its aromatic flavor, and appeals no more to the eye, smell or taste, it is fierce; but when left in a sick room, with the lid off, it fills the room with a fragrance only jacque-minots can rival. The very smell of coffee in a sick room terrorizes death."

“It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way”––Christopher Morley

Similes are the stuff of…yoga. In a given yoga class, you can liken to a tree, an eagle, a fish. How about a rabbit that will thread a needle? What of a cobra who springs from a child? This isn’t the domain of Lewis Carroll. These are all transitions.

Without transition there would be no change. So this is how I see yoga: as a way of learning how to tolerate change. No matter how welcome, any change moves us out of a comfortable status quo.

Of the unlikely places I have led a weekly yoga class, the most memorable is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for their staff. With my social work mentality, I viewed this endeavor as a community outreach program, where the organization benefits because the employees benefit. By their own account, participants who gave up their lunch break once a week for yoga found it easier to concentrate on their work afterward.

How to impart what occurred there, an hour a week, in a classroom on the lower level of the Museum, is the stuff of…similes. My witnesses, my quoted sources, in order as they appear in the following paragraph are: William Wordsworth, W.S. Merwin, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. All yogis, no doubt.

We become receptive as water, not only the gentleness of its fluidity, but also like a wave's crash that breaks the surface of the harshness of the world––that is “too much with us; late and soon”––coming up for air––“does your air remember you o breath of morning”––that breathes into us, composes us into spirals like a nautilus, the unwinding of those chambers reminded of a further reach, we stand––“and then, if we are true to plan, our statures touch the skies”––by balancing, we seem to fly, like a wiser Icarus who learns the trick of a modicum of fire, we warm to a warrior stride, ultimately surrendering our defense, to the earth we bow and then align in humble repose––“at the still point of the turning world”.

This description is not something I would ever put on a resume. But it’s true.

“Writing is like trying to ride a horse which is constantly changing beneath you, Proteus changing while you hang on to him. You have to hang on for dear life, but not hang on so hard that he can't change and finally tell you the truth.”––Peter Elbow

Seeing the premiere of Jann Gallois’ Quintette – "Quintet" – at the Atelier de Paris – Carolyn Carlson this past December put me in mind of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels for kids. That’s because, one summer day, on the way out to play, my son idly plucked up a dusty copy of one of the adventures from a musty shelf, opened the cover and immediately plopped down on the floor, utterly absorbed. His absorption pretty much represents my reaction to the piece, which will feature at the end of March, beginning of April 2018, at the Théâtre National de Chaillot.

My appreciation comes down to this: the emotions raised by Gallois’ choreographic argument become, in effect, the choreography of the piece. She aligns choreography closely to ordinary relational movement (the fruit, I guess, of being literate in hip-hop and contemporary dance performance). Her approach holds together as performance because it focuses on the precision of the expression of movement rather than on the movement itself.

The five performers use a sort of gestural tool kit – desire (for the other/for recognition by the other), power, position, trust, affection – to build firm symmetries of emotional call & response. Just as soon as any of a symmetry’s facets push too hard on any other or the negative or positive distance between one body and another slips out of sync, the whole symmetry dissolves into a fluid of searching bodies.

So, technically, Quintette does exactly what Gallois told me it would during an interview summer last, when she was creating it.

In the image of the 2016 trio-performance Carte Blanche, Quintette tests the capacity of human bodies to synchronize.

But, much more to the point for me, like Compact, the piece that brought Gallois to my notice, Quintette opens up emotions that sweep the spectator along and, at the end, leaves him or her wondering about the nature of people rather than of the bricks and mortar of choreography.

The guy squinched up against me on the hard concrete bleacher-like seat in the steam-cooker of a performance space we were parked in nudged me in the ribs with his elbow. He asked, hoarsely, I swear, whether I’d ever seen Gallois perform. When I said I hadn’t, he slapped his forehead and said the equivalent of Golly! Are you in for a treat!

“This crazy man is surely a relative,” is what I told myself at the time. He was so rigidly attentive as the piece opened that I thought I had every reason to believe I was in for a little neighborly crazy-man catalepsy.

But, no. I was soon totally absorbed myself. And, later in the year, when I brought Karine to see Compact – Karine, who brims with common sense, is my reality tester – squeezed my hand meaningfully during the performance.

So, now, after Quintette, if you ask me about Jann Gallois, I confidently slap my forehead, too, and say Golly! even if my manners remain good enough that I’d never dream of nudging your ribs with my elbow.

We also have in this week's post, a great many poems inspired by these seven specific titles: “Quick Question,” “Cheap Tricks,” “Long Story Short,” “Estimated Wait Time,” “Headline Risk,” “I personally guarantee,” and “The Take-Away.

The winner took a title from the heap and made it his first line and gave his own title, the date, which I think works very well for the poem and specifically, the last line. I also really like the music made by half rhymes that show up whenever they want to, in mostly unexpected places, and the way the story unfolds, leaving most of the details in between the lines.

“January 1, 2018” by J. F. McCullers

Long story short,My father didn’t join usThis New Year’s Day.He didn’t smoke on the porch.He didn’t eat black-eyed peas.He didn’t go home full and sleepy.

Instead he sat alone in the sunOn the little bridgeOver the dark creekWhere we opened the urnAnd scattered her ashesLast New Year’s Day.

I also couldn't help but share this witty haiku.

"Cheap (Reader) Tricks" by Clay Sparkman

I once asked a friend “Did you read my new Haiku?” “I started,” he said.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post with more poems, more anecdotes, and the prompt for next week!

We are civilized, and we take our seats––a lot. Many of us are compensating for all this sitting by working out. We task our bodies to exercise, all in the quest for balance and fitness. It’s a noble quest, yet…what is our relationship with our embodied selves? I had the great fortune to study SynergyDance, also known as “Dance as a Healing Art” with founder Charmaine Lee, after a stint overseas where I had taken leave of my senses––no, my roots in dance, to be a social worker.

Charmaine’s Class

"Do you want to be mechanical, or move with spirit?"she shouted across the DC studio all the wayfrom South Africa where outspoken againstthe machinery of Apartheid too soon too loud once exiled she chooses this motherland of dance.

In her classes, the interplay of yoga and cultural dance with the five elements of earth, air, fire, water, and ether (potential) allowed for new pathways to distribute vital energy. This was not about being a better dancer or more fit, but being open, fluid, and challenged to move in ways contrary to habit. People were having a fabulous time, and I had never seen so much joy in one room from people of all strata of society––writers, mothers, drummers, chefs, flight attendants, therapists, business owners––dancing. And this was not the sixties. It was the nineties, in the capital of the U.S., the seat of government.

Back to “seat”, have your shoulders been hunched for a while? Has your breath been shallow? Please take a moment to lean back and stretch your arms (which also expands your chest), circle your wrists, shake your hands, tilt your head to one side and the other, tune in to sensation. We become numb in our relationship to the body for the sake of functioning, to be efficient as well as productive. But we aren’t machines. Watching Aboriginal dance in Australia (during my travels in 2014) is a vivid reminder.

You don’t have to be in the studio or gym to pay attention to what is happening in your body and to resource your self. Your well-being is, well, being. The tendency is to compartmentalize: to take care of ourselves at certain times in certain settings, and at other times to be neglectful. We are at risk of losing our sensual, essential human nature––which is what connects us as a species.

Next week, as we all know, Elizabeth Alexander (left) will read a poem composed for the occasion at the inauguration of Barack Obama.The welcome mat is being extended by communities beyond the sphere of constant poetry-readers.George W. Bush disdained the presence of a poet at his two inaugurations, and in fact there now seems to be a party split as to the desirability of having a poet share the limelight with the pastor and the new president.Republicans say no, in thunder, and Democrats gladly schedule a few minutes of verse as part of the ceremony.Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and Miller Williams have spent time at the podium, thanks to the sponsorship of center-left presidents-elect.This situation seems rather odd, since conservatives historically have respected the literary, and more generally the cultural, tradition.Who is more conservative than a poet—he or she who seeks to conserve or preserve the riches of the English language and the wisdom of the ages?Modern poets were more politically conservative than not, as with Pound, Eliot, Frost, Tate, and Stevens, though the term is clearly insufficient for the complexity of their poetic temperaments, to say nothing of figures like D. H. Lawrence (an honorary American), William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Alexander is an excellent choice because she carries forward what I think of as the great tradition of public poetry by African American authors exemplified most ambitiously by Robert Hayden(right).That is, she has worked hard to construct a pantheon of black citizens and artists, and victims, in order to write the African American person into the complex narrative of American history.Hayden worked programmatically to place the lives of figures like Phillis Wheately, Nat Turner, Cinquez (Alexander has also written a long poem featuring the Amistad), Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Paul Robeson, Tiger Flowers, Bessie Smith, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and others, into the literary record.(He was completing a poem about Josephine Baker when he died.)His agenda evokes the statues of presidents and generals and suchlike that populated most communities in the nation until recently.Nobody seems to miss these statues, except Tom Wolfe who has argued for them in several essays, but we would certainly miss the presence of neglected public figures in poems if writers like Alexander, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Sam Cornish, A. Van Jordan, and many others, stopped writing them.

Once it was a culture war, or perhaps a race war, as to which people were to be celebrated.Don L. Lee addressed white readers in the 1960s in what he called a nationhood poem, “u take artur rubenstein over thelonious monk . . .u take robert bly over imamu baraka . . . u take picasso over charles white . . .”Hayden made no such binary oppositions in his poems and criticism, which earned him the enmity of poets like Lee (now Haki R. Madhubuti), nor does Alexander, though in her signature poem “Today’s News,” she imagines the host of the old TV program This Is Your Life as an apparition with a message:“Ralph Edwards comes into the bedroom and says, ‘Elizabeth / this is your life. Get up and look for color, / look for color everywhere.’”A self-confessed “child of Gwendolyn Brooks and Walt Whitman,” in her poem “Stravinsky in L.A.” Alexander has the composer looking for color everywhere, and juxtaposes his welding of found colors into sounds with the syncretic towers of Simon Rodia in Watts.

On the National Mall and by our TV sets all Americans will be looking for color at the inauguration and seeing plenty of it, a feast for sore eyes.And listening for Alexander to read a poem that will bring memories of Robert Frost at the Kennedy inauguration, unable to read his long prepared text, “For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration” in the blustery weather, but speaking “The Gift Outright” as a full-throated discourse on the nation’s marriage to the land.

Poetry critics need something to write about, so the old debates continue, like those between advocates of “political poetry” and “personal poetry.”In caricature form, this would be a debate between those who write about monumental public figures and those who write about love relationships and flowers.(“Flowery” is the chief insult hurled by partisans of the hard-edge against not only a melodious style but a subject matter bereft of heroic struggle.)The debate between advocates of “formal” verse and “free” verse rears its ugly head from time to time.But working poets like Hayden and Alexander please us because they move beyond the hostile contraries, contributing to the sum total of reality and vision we work with in our everyday lives and in our reveries.The word for the day is post-partisan, best understood not as granting equal time to Artur Rubenstein and Thelonious Monk, or Stravinsky and Paul Robeson, but imagining the world as something more complex than a football game with two rival teams locked in combat forever.If we have the collective wisdom to grant every poem, like every flower and every person, the right to be seen and heard, we have a chance to advance in the direction Hayden indicated in “Words in the Mourning Time”:

a human world where godliness

is possible and man

is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

Robert Hayden was the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, the forerunner of the Poet Laureate office, during 1976-77.Afterward, he would perform a funny routine about the tasks of his position.“People would call me up and say, ‘Is this the Consultant in Poetry?Can you tell me what blank verse is?’”And he did a stand-up shtik in which his boss Gerald Ford would sidle into the office, pull out a thick sheaf of paper from his waistcoat pocket, and say, “Bob, the little lady likes to try her hand at verse now and again.I wonder if you. . .?”On the subject of his proximity to the eminent, he liked to tell the story of finding himself standing next to Henry Kissinger at the urinals one day, giving him a big smile and saying “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” and receiving an alarmed look from the great man, who finished up quickly and fled the bathroom.He meant the anecdote, I think, as a parable of how futile it was to speak poetry to power.But that didn’t discourage him from going back to Ann Arbor and writing “American Journal,” one of the most inventive and post-partisan public poems of our period.

So, you go, Elizabeth Alexander, and help nurture the Obama Era now in its genesis.And thank you Jorie Graham for writing about Guantanamo.And Galway Kinnell and Lawrence Joseph and Timothy Liu for the montages of lower Manhattan during 9/11.And Raymond McDaniel for bringing Hurricane Katrina to vivid life again in Saltwater Empire.And Jacqueline Osherow for articulating the spiritual connection between America and Israel in The Hoopoe’s Crown.Thanks to all poets who celebrate the glamour of flowers, and the raptures (and desolations) of love.Don’t worry about your readers being too doctrinaire or lacking the intellectual curiosity to pay attention.

January 16, 2018

P.R. Exhilaration and groaning. Frustration and freedom. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through. The day-by-day repertoire of oscillating dualities that any talent withstands — and tremendous solitude, too. And the silence: 50 years in a room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking out, when all went well, my minimum daily allowance of usable prose.

People have signature moves, which collapses the argument that you can’t or don’t dance. There’s a proscenium that is not a dance floor––it’s wherever you exist in space, with weight, timing and energy. Rudolph Laban codified these four aspects of human movement in his theory of Effort/Shape: use of space is indirect or direct, sense of weight is strong or light, timing is quick or sustained, flow is free or bound. During my dance therapy graduate studies at NYU, we hit the pavement in Greenwich Village to watch people walk and do ordinary things––through the lens of Laban’s theory. Later, we would apply this lens to special populations in places like Bellevue Hospital, Bronx Psychiatric Center, and the Lighthouse for the Blind. Charles Simic observes like a dance therapist in this poem (from Classic Ballroom Dances published by George Braziller):

Classic Ballroom Dances

Grandmothers who wring the necksOf chickens; old nunsWith names like Theresa, Marianne,Who pull schoolboys by the ear;

The intricate steps of pickpocketsWorking the crowd of the curiousAt the scene of an accident; the slow shuffleOf the evangelist with a sandwich board;

The hesitation of the early-morning customerPeeking through the window grilleOf a pawnshop; the weave of a little kidWho is walking to school with eyes closed;

And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek,On the dance floor of the Union Hall,Where they also hold charity rafflesOn rainy Monday nights of an eternal November.

Coincidentally, the poem’s first verb “wring” is one of Laban’s eight “Efforts”, characterized by indirect, sustained, strong and bound movement. Germane as it is to human action, it can also be laden with emotion. In a written scenario, it gives a visceral response. And what about the Flamenco version of “wring” in this photo of my friend Gabriela Granados, director of American Bolero Dance Company­­?

Look through the technique and virtuosity of the art form––the expressivity that is dance has subtle beginnings, inherent to being human.

January 15, 2018

Stephanie Adams-Santos’ collection of finely-wrought, barbed, numinous lyric poems weaves from “a few warbled jags of wind” a laurel for all searchers enthralled and menaced by the beauty of a world “full of strange experience.” These are poems composed “in the tight sling of the chrysalid,” “belted to the bolt of being,” where every word sounds “lassoed to a bell.” Adams-Santos pitches her poems between chrysalis and swarm, self and world, I and thou, aware “of the secret lathe / now turning in the pulp / of our living.” “Tongue,” a representative poem from the middle of the collection, reads:

Loin of the skull

who lives in the bell of my bone,

little black place of music—

If you have vespers, O won’t the toad come?

Swarm Queen’s Crown presents for our inspection real gardens with imaginary toads in them, the voluptuous gasp at the center of a thorny prayer.

Echolalia in Script gorgeously collects Sam Roxas-Chua’s asemic writings in a gallery of images contextualized by the title poem. The stunning examples of open form writing in this book are “flawed disiderata,” failed cartographies, “troubled cantatas,” “true languages born of beak & exhale.” As Roxas-Chua notes in the introduction, his interest in wordless open semantic forms of writing parallels his work as a poet and stems, in part, from his personal history: “born to Filipino parents, adopted into a Chinese family, and then later immigrating to America resulted in a number of displacements that prevented me from taking claim to country or language.” Echolalia in Script is a book of elemental, angelic, visionary beauty rendered in the illimitable shorthand of the divine, an austere infinite tracery, a singing Forever composed of untranslatable Nows.

Each poem in David Giannini’s Porous Borders unfolds as “a gymnast who somersaults from a balance beam, but never lands; instead she becomes that somersault.” These, as Giannini calls them, “vertical prosepoems,” spin out from the mundane, through “a place of lyric dissociation,” “smuggling the invisible over the borders of normative prose.” The poetry in this collection is luminous and strange, as if cribbed from a dream of Paul Valery assayed and translated by Russell Edson. With élan and slapstick precision, Gianinni’s poems bristle like porcupines “in an unlit cellar full of inflated balloons. Porous Borders is a particularly vibrant addition to the history of the American prose poem.

Nin Andrews’ funny, buoyant, joyous, and deeply intelligent chapbook, Our Lady of the Orgasm, picks up where her collection, The Book of Orgasms, left off when it was published seventeen years ago. Like her two most recent full-length collections, Why God Is a Woman and Miss August, Our Lady provides further proof of Andrews’ mastery of the prose poem. In Andrews’ work, the vocation of the poem and the orgasm are the same: “it is their job to keep the sacred balance, to keep us all from curling inward like a scroll, never to be read or known.” With great skill, Andrews’ poetry sorts through the disparities between real and potential, between form and freedom, between fiction and nonfiction, between prose and poetry, urging her readers away from solipsism and superficiality, from the theoretical to the angelic. Reading a prose poem by Nin Andrews is like learning how to fly through a blizzard, or like growing gills and remembering how to breathe underwater.

Martha Rhodes newest collection of poetry, The Thin Wall, trains the compound eye of the lyric on the burdens of inheritance that constitute selfhood. Through the thin walls of these poems, angles of vision go askew, family histories and relationships snare and fracture, forgotten “greenesses” pop up, and the dead “take all we have.” Each poem in this collection is a door leading to another door, a kafka-esque series of routines “all seen clearly from this place we want to remain / inside forever, place of Etcetera.” The Thin Wall posits all remembering, and indeed all perception, as tenuous, fraught, and wildly shifting. Martha Rhodes’s poetry is uncompromising, febrile, night bound, visceral; she offers no balm. She provokes. She unsettles. She makes you feel the disappointments and disruptions of everyday life flying in your knuckles.

Paterson Light and Shadow pairs the poetry of the city’s finest living poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, with the arresting tonalities of Mark Hillringhouse’s photography. The conversation between Hillringhouse’s stirring black and white images and Mazziotti Gillan’s deeply moving autobiographical poems brings to life the vibrant history of one of the first cities of American poetry, birthplace of Allen Ginsberg and muse to William Carlos Williams. In “December Dusk,” Mazziotti Gillan writes: “A precariousness steals over things / at dusk when darkness bleeds the light away / and our shadows stretch their long fingers.” An exquisite precariousness steals over the graffitied factories, the abandoned boxing gyms, The Great Falls, the diners, the side streets, the public schools, the crumbling monuments, and the dilapidated stoops enshrined in the pages of this book. For Hillringhouse and Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson is a place both haunted and sacred; at any moment the drab and ramshackle might give way to memory’s “dizzying panorama, luminous / and vast.” Paterson Light and Shadow is a love note to an archetypal American place unfolding in the dialogue between word and image; to eavesdrop on the discussion between Mazziotti Gillan and Hillringhouse is to understand more deeply their charged and fortifying relationship to this remarkable city.

Just Another Day in Just Our Town is Bruce Bennett’s second New and Selected, picking up where Navigating the Distances left off in 1999. Throughout Just Another Day Bennett weds his technical mastery to a big-hearted embrace of the quotidian; he marshals sonnet, villanelle, and a variety of other measured forms to explore the ever-shifting and diaphanous contours of his life as a poet, professor, and husband. Bennett’s verse bears the fingerprints of the poets he lovingly parodies in the selection culled from Loose Canon: Christina Rossetti, Poe, Robert Browning, Hardy, Burns, Yeats, Frost, Bishop, Williams, Pound, and Dickinson. In “I Dwell,” Bennett writes:

I dwell in Gullibility – A fairer House than Doubt – That gives me lots of Choices – That I can’t live – without –

Bruce Bennett’s true abode is in the sonorous notes of the poetic line. These poems are proof of a life lived with Blakean exuberance and Keatsian beauty. Whether meditating on the life of his father, imagining swimming in a watering can, or railing against Donald Trump, Bruce Bennett’s Just Another Day in Just Our Town offers a selection of poems both timely and timeless.

"Lively and affectionate" Publisher's Weekly. Now in paperback.Click image to order your copy.

Register now for our 5th annual session Jan 27 - Feb 3. “What better place to read, write, and talk about the art and craft of writing than Todos Santos, where all the saints of the sea and sky watch over you?” - Christopher Merrill

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I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours laterto the greatnessof Teddy Wilson"After You've Gone"on the pianoin the cornerof the bedroomas I enterin the dark